The invention relates generally to wind turbine systems and, more particularly, to systems and methods for management of wind turbines.
Wind turbines are increasingly gaining importance in the area of renewable sources of energy generation. A wind turbine generally includes a wind rotor having turbine blades that transform wind energy into rotational motion of a drive shaft, which in turn is utilized to drive a rotor of an electrical generator to produce electrical power. In recent times, wind turbine technology has been applied to large-scale power generation applications. Modern wind power generation systems typically take the form of a wind turbine farm (or wind-farm) having multiple such wind turbines that are operable to supply power to a transmission system providing power to a utility system.
Of the many challenges that exist in harnessing wind energy, one is maximizing wind turbine performance. One of the factors that affect the wind turbine performance is down time due to tripped wind turbines on account of a fault, or unsuitable operating conditions, such as environmental conditions among others. On detection of a fault or unsuitable conditions, the wind turbines are tripped to avoid damage to the wind turbines. Currently, human intervention is required to assess the causes for the wind turbine being tripped and then reset the wind turbine to start operating again. Consequently, long down times of the wind turbine are experienced to have trained personnel to assess, analyze and reset or restart the tripped wind turbine.
Typically, service engineers review the turbine fault logs from a remote location and reset the turbine. In certain instances, a physical inspection or review of the wind turbine may be required to identify the cause of a fault, or to reset the wind turbine, in such cases field service engineers diagnose the faults, fix the root cause for problem and thereafter reset the turbine. The review and reset process for each individual wind turbine usually requires a substantial time from the service engineers. Further, in wind-farms having hundreds or thousands of wind turbines, the review and reset process for each wind turbine that is tripped can be logistically challenging, and in certain cases, may require a substantial turn around time from the service engineers, during which time the wind turbines will be non-operational. The non-operational time of wind turbines may translate in to significant loss of productivity for the wind-farm. Maintaining a staff of multiple service engineers to handle an eventuality of multiple wind turbines requiring support on the wind-farms increases the costs of supporting the maintenance staff significantly.
The aforementioned systems require that manual analysis be conducted on the turbine data for detecting root causes for faults in the wind turbine and the wind turbines are reset through manual commands from service team, either remotely or locally at site. This process leads to substantive down times of wind turbines, causing losses on account of less productivity. Further, maintaining a support staff to analyze fault logs and turbine data; accordingly service the wind turbines further leads to additional maintenance costs. Therefore, a need exists for an improved wind turbine management system that may address one or more of the problems set forth above.